_Discusses philosophers Mencius and Aristotle as socio-ecological thinkers._ Mencius (385–303/302 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE) were contemporaries, but are often understood to represent opposite ends of the philosophical spectrum. Mencius is associated with the ecological, emergent, flowing, and connected; Artistotle with the rational, static, abstract, and binary. Douglas Robinson argues that in their conceptions of rhetoric, at least, Mencius and Aristotle are much more similar than different: both are powerfully socio-ecological, espousing and exploring collectivist thinking about the circulation of energy (...) and social value through groups. The agent performing the actions of _pistis_, “persuading-and-being-persuaded,” in Aristotle and _zhi_, “governing-and-being-governed,” in Mencius is, Robinson demonstrates, not so much the rhetor as an individual as it is the whole group. Robinson tracks this collectivistic thinking through a series of comparative considerations using a theory that draws impetus from Arne Naess’s “ecosophical” deep ecology and from work on rhetoric powered by affective ecologies, but with details of the theory drawn equally from Mencius and Aristotle. (shrink)

Este libro promete ser una contribución para el estudio de la teoría crítica en general y para el análisis de la historia de la Escuela de Frankfurt en particular. Todos los trabajos que están contenidos en este volumen hacen parte del amplio marco teórico de la teoría crítica de la sociedad. Muchos siguen las huellas de los fundadores de esta tendencia, mientras que otros se presentan como críticos de la misma y unos cuantos más tratan de vincular problemas y contextos (...) de relevancia a los conceptos más destacados que se empezaron a construir hace cien años en Frankfurt. Encontramos como buena excusa para su publicación precisamente el año centenario del Instituto de Investigación Social. Además, hemos creído conveniente organizar los materiales en secciones que van desde la historia de la Escuela de Frankfurt hasta la consideración de algunos interrogantes de actualidad motivados por el desarrollo de la teoría crítica. No obstante, con esto no pretendemos establecer límites absolutos de clasificación. Confesamos que nuestra forma de organizar los ensayos responde simplemente a criterios editoriales más que a cuestiones teóricas y conceptuales. Claramente las intersecciones entre los estudios aquí presentados son amplias y hacen que cada una de las propuestas pueda dialogar con las otras en función de sus evidentes parecidos de familia. (shrink)

Стаття присвячена концепту спільноти в інтерпретації Алена Бадью. Автором доводиться актуальність звернення до творчості Бадью в контексті сучасного осмислення спільноти: узагальнююча щодо сучасних теорій, концепція Бадью при цьому є єдиною, що вибудовується навколо понять істини-події-суб’єкта. Категорично відмовляючись прийняти твердження про те, що немає нічого, крім індивідів, Бадью постійно повертається до концепту спільноти, осмислюваної ним через братерство. У статті досліджено три ключові характеристики спільноти: зв’язок з реальним, неіменованість, неможливість. Доведено, що констатація н еможливості спільноти не обмежується зазначенням поточної політичної ситуації, а (...) має філософське значення. При цьому підкреслено тезу Бадью про те, що неможливість спільнот не означає відмови від імперативу емансипації. Проаналізовано зв’язок визначення спільноти із категорією реального, зазначено основні подібності та відмінності в інтерпретації реального між Аленом Бадью та Жаком Лаканом і Славоєм Жижеком. Виявлено вписаність бадьюанської концепції спільноти у філософський контекст осмислень спільноти як _прийдешньої, розтвореної, невизнаної. _ Акцентовано увагу на десубстанційованості спільноти як основній вимозі Бадью, підкреслено несприйняття ним спільнот, об’єднаних певною партикулярною рисою, в якості спільнот. Окремо приділено увагу братерству як перервній пристрасті та маніфестуванню «ми» спільноти. Визначено роль і значимість вимоги неіменованості спільноти у Бадью, а тож проаналізовано наслідки її іменування у формі симулякру та катастрофи. Акцентовано увагу на наслідках шва філософії та політики, що проходить через концепт спільноти: це «екстаз місця», редукція розмаїтих імен політики до одного імені, деспотизм істин. Проблематизовано задачу винайдення фактора, що може лише включати в спільноту, нікого не відкидаючи. Підкреслено значимість рішення Бадью центрувати спільноту на події, яка є водночас сингулярною за проявом та універсальною за відкритою нею істиною. Досліджено, як ідею «універсального одиничного» Бадью виводить із вчення апостола Павла про істину-подію. Таким чином, зроблено висновок, що спільнота у Бадью визначається через неіменованість та неможливість її як реального ситуації. (shrink)

A brief account of the work of Giorgio Agamben and its relation to the work of Jean-Luc Nancy.

This paper is a contribution to a discussion in philosophy of technology by focusing on the epistemological status of the example. Of the various developments in the emerging, inchoate field of philosophy of technology, the “empirical turn” stands out as having left the most enduring mark on the trajectory contemporary research takes. From a historical point of view, the empirical turn can best be understood as a corrective to the overly “transcendentalizing” tendencies of “classical” philosophers of technology, such as Heidegger. (...) Empirically oriented philosophy of technology emphasizes actual technologies through case-study research into the formation of technical objects and systems (constructivist studies) and how they, for example, transform our perceptions and conceptions (the phenomenological tradition) or pass on and propagate relations of power (critical theory). This paper explores the point of convergence of classical and contemporary approaches by means of the notion of the “example” or “paradigm.” It starts with a discussion of the quintessential modern philosopher of technology, Martin Heidegger, and his thinking about technology in terms of the ontological difference. Heidegger’s framing of technology in terms of this difference places the weight of intelligibility entirely on the side of being, to such an extent that his examples become heuristic rather than constitutive. The second part of the paper discusses the methodological and epistemological import of the “example” and the form of intelligibility it affords. Drawing on the work of Wittgenstein (standard metre), Foucault (panopticism), and Agamben (paradigm), we argue that the example offers an alternative way of understanding the study of technologies from that of empirical case studies. (shrink)

This paper suggests that a grammar of the secret forms a concept in Agamben’s work, a gap that grounds the enigma of sovereignty. Between the Indo-European *krei, *se, and *per themes, the secret is etymologically linked to the logics of separation and potentiality that together enable the pliant and emergent structure of sovereignty. Sovereignty’s logic of separation meets the logic of relation in the form of abandonment: the point at which division has exhausted itself and reaches an indivisible element, bare (...) life, the exception separated from the form of life and captured in a separate sphere. The arcanum imperii of sovereignty and the cipher of bare life are held together in the relation of the ban as the twin secrets of biopower, maintained by the potentiality of law that works itself as a concealed, inscrutable force. But the ‘real’ secret of sovereignty, I suggest, is its dialectical reversibility, the point at which the concept of the secret is met by its own immanent unworking by the critic and scribe under the *krei theme, and subject to abandonment through the work of profanation; here, different species of the secret are thrown against one another, one order undoing the other. The secret founded upon the sacred is displaced by Agamben’s critical orientation toward the immanent: what is immanent is both potential and hiddenness. (shrink)

The current proliferation of restitutive claims in response to expropriation in armed conflicts occurs at the interstices of humanitarianism and transitional justice. Restitution indicates the expansion of the humanitarian mandate from providing immediate relief to those who have suffered loss, to engaging in remedial, redressive and restorative practices. That intersection between the humanitarian goals and post-conflict justice is one of the signs of ‘new’ forms and ethos of humanitarianism. This article offers a critical reading of the ‘restitutive desire’ underpinning the (...) humanitarian restitutive politics, which it relates to political fantasies of reversibility and undoing. It locates the genealogy of restitution in Émile Durkheim’s work on the division of labour, individualization and the distinction between repressive and restitutive law. It argues that in the Durkheimian socio-legal tradition restitution figures as a return of ‘matters to their former status’ and of ‘disturbed relationships to their normal form’. It then turns to Sigmund Freud’s essay on Daniel Schreber, which defines restitution not as procedure of undoing, but as a reparative practice that nevertheless affirms the subject’s ‘catastrophic loss of the world’. The Freudian perspective uncouples restitution and undoing and asks about the possibility of restitutive politics haunted by unrectifiable loss. (shrink)

In this paper reling on Agamben’s genealogical endeavour with regard to the concept of oath, I shall try to discuss how he renders the relation between language and the destituent power that will lead me to address ‘the new experience of the word’, namely, pistis (faith), which is placed at the centre of the messianic announcement. In order to open up this point, I will take into consideration Jacques Derrida’s arguments related to faith and language which appear to be one (...) of the main addressees of Agamben’s critical undertaking, even though he is never mentioned in Agamben’s later book The Sacrament of Language, in which he elaborates the contours of the relation between language and pistis. For Derrida the opening of language is based on an oath, a promise of saying ‘yes’ and thus, speaking is an act of faith. However, it is this functioning of language that has to be suspended according to Agamben, since it is this very dispositif that is connected to sovereign power. It is through this suspension the living being who has language may cease to be homo sacer before language and sovereign power. (shrink)

This paper is a response to the previous articles on potentialism. It draws attention to the particular nature of the stance taken by potentialism. Although the project of potentialism is not a simple matter of establishing another discipline in education, it wavers at the junction between the prescriptive and the descriptive understanding towards education. This paper raises the question how the project of ‘potentialism’ relates to the prescriptive and the descriptive, and thereby how educational questions around the experience of potentiality (...) can be shaped. Second, it explores further four key points in the account of potentialism as developed in the previous articles: the educational subject, tiredness vs. exhaustion, language and thinking. (shrink)

Schmitt insists that the sovereign decision is unavoidable, that even an anarchist is caught in the trap of sovereignty when he tries to ‘decide against decision’. This article begins to think about a critical legal vocabulary that might suspend the necessity of the will to constitute, while emphasising the creativity of the constituent moment. The terms inoperativity, dis-enclosure and dissensus are developed and deployed in order to think about certain aspects of the Tunisian revolution. In particular, the article focuses upon (...) the refusal of the state of the situation, the subtraction of loyalty and the insistence of a form of life beyond Ben Ali’s sovereign order. (shrink)

Despite the advances made in the liberal Western philosophical and educational tradition to counteract unethical, immoral and inhumane acts committed by the human species, these acts of inhumanity persist. It would be inapt to apportion blame only to Western thinking, which has its roots in Greek antiquity, as Plato and Aristotle, for instance, perpetually and justifiably pursued and advocated the human enactment of civility and friendship in their writings. Instead of revisiting liberal views on education and arguing for a reconsidered (...) view of humanity—a possible and plausible contention—this article draws on African philosophical thought on education to disturb some of the doubts in potentially disrupting atrocities committed against the human race, especially on the African continent. By drawing on the philosophical ideas of Agamben, in particular the notions of actuality, potentiality and becoming, it is argued that an instance of African philosophy of education—ubuntu —can do much to trouble the escalating levels of inhumanity on the African continent. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the possibility of conceiving a form of social critique that has its locus in the human body. Therefore I engage in a close reading of the work of Butler which can be analysed as an elaboration of a Foucaldian critical ‘virtue’. In order to elaborate and to refine my ideas I go deeper into the criticisms McNay has uttered regarding the very impossibility of taking any distance from a given social or political order within a (...) Foucaldian–Butlerian framework. I show that there is no need to have recourse to a phenomenological perspective, as McNay claims, in order to achieve ‘critical distance’. On the contrary, I argue that it is imperative to explore a register of bodily experience that entails self-expropriation and which is linked to an attitude or ‘ethos’ that renounces any judgemental perspective. (shrink)

In this article I try to conceive a new approach towards laughter in the context of formal schooling. I focus on laughter in so far as it is a bodily response during which we are entirely delivered to uncontrollable, spasmodic reactions. To see the educational relevance of this particular kind of laughter, as well as to understand why laughter is often dealt with in a very negative way in pedagogical contexts, this phenomenon should be carefully distinguished from humor or amusement. (...) I build my argument for a smaller part on the basis of conceptual analysis, and to a greater extent on Bakhtin’s work on the transition from Medieval folk culture to Modern civilized culture, in which he claims that a reduction from laughing as a strongly physical experience to mere forms of amusement or humor actually implies that laughter no longer possesses its inherent equalizing and communizing potential. In a sense, laughter forms a threat to any organization of social existence according to similarities and differences in identity and position, and this explains why we usually try to suppress it, or why we try to render it functional in view of the continuation of a societal regime or pedagogical order. More positively formulated, laughter may be said to have an intrinsic educational meaning, because it allows a significant transformation of individual and collective existence. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the educational value of raising the human body at school. Drawing inspiration from the work of Giorgio Agamben, I develop a new perspective that explores the possibility of taking the concept of physical education in a literal sense. This is to say that the specific educational content of physical education (in contradistinction to organized sporting life outside school) resides in its concentration on the physical ?as such?. This is not an obvious path to explore, because (...) defenders of physical education as a rule have to compete against the (dualist) prejudice that this discipline is merely an instrument to train the body or to keep it fit, and that it therefore should not be considered as a serious endeavour. Therefore, more often than not, apologists try to justify the relevance of physical education on the very ground that it is a practice that is concerned with something ?beyond? the merely physical that is at stake in movement activity. I argue, however, that this line of thought excludes the possibility of conceiving an alternative approach that relates the concentration on ?entirely physical? activities (as opposed to ?merely physical? activities) to an experience of potentiality. I develop this idea on the basis of an analysis of repetitive, rhythmical and collective body-exercise (e.g. running in a group or basic callisthenics). (shrink)

This article explores the uses of Agamben’s philosophy for understanding the educational meaning of practices that typically take/took place at school, such as the collective rehearsal of the alphabet or the multiplication tables. More precisely, I propose that these forms of ‘practising’ show what schooling, as a particular and historically contingent institution, is all about. Instead of immediately assessing the ‘practice of practising’ in terms of learning outcomes, I turn to Bollnow’s attempt to analyze this phenomenon in a substantially educational (...) way, which for him essentially consists in opposing practising and learning. I show that his analysis is superficial and that we need Agamben’s notion of ‘potentiality’ in order to come to grips with the sense of this phenomenon. This will allow to see that practising concerns an uncommon way to relate to a subject matter that makes possible a transformation of individual and collective existence. The main objective of this investigation is not to hold a plea for reintroducing obsolete pedagogical methods, but to rethink the very meaning of education. (shrink)

The present article investigates the rhythm of study as described by Giorgio Agamben in ‘The idea of study’, present in Idea of prose. In this short treatise, Agamben presents Melville’s scrivener Bartleby as the exemplary embodiment of study. Bartleby’s paradigmatic status, according to Agamben’s interpretation, does, however, exclude him from belonging to the ‘class of study’. Bartleby’s exclusion leads to the discovery of an unmentioned member of the ‘class of study’: Eros. The surprising absence of Eros dissolves, however, once he (...) is recuperated as the image of ‘The idea of the work’. Bartleby’s exclusion and Eros’s absent inclusion and presence as the ‘The idea of the work’ not only demonstrate the close relation between study and work, but also explain Agamben’s considerations on the connection between study and the nature of his own work. The article concludes with a call for the remaining importance of Agamben’s festina lente, the rhythm of study, within the broader context of our contemporary university institutions. Once the incessant shuttling between passion and action has been called to a halt—in favour of one of the two extremities—study becomes impossible. (shrink)

Political theorists continue to be provoked by Giorgio Agamben’s disturbing diagnosis that ‘bare life’ – human life that is excluded from politics yet exposed to sovereign violence – is not a sign of the malfunction of modern politics but rather a revelation of how it actually functions. However, despite the enormous amount of attention this diagnosis has received, there has been relatively little discussion of Agamben’s proposed ‘cure’ for the problem that he diagnoses. In this article, I analyze the three (...) main concepts of Agamben’s positive philosophical program – ‘infancy,’ ‘potentiality,’ and ‘form-of-life’ – in order to show how he attempts to subvert the sovereignty of law over life with his idea of a life of habit in which life is sovereign over law. In addition to analyzing these concepts, I engage in an immanent critique of Agamben’s philosophy and contrast his vision of politics with those of other influential contemporary political theorists. I find that while Agamben’s philosophical program is almost undone by internal difficulties, it still radically challenges current theories of subjectivity, humanity, and community. (shrink)

If politics is understood as a foundational and open-ended activity, a general problem that arises from such a framing concerns the question of how to sustain the possibility of continuous openings without converting action into permanence and closure. In this article, we approach this problematic by treating Hannah Arendt as an exemplary figure in the current of political thought that emphasizes the indeterminate nature of action. We focus more specifically on how Arendt addressed the question of sustaining action by exploring (...) the role of forgiveness, promises, divided power, and principles of action in her thought. While we show that the task of sustaining the indeterminacy of action partly remains an unresolvable paradox for Arendt, a general force underpinning the thought of Giorgio Agamben sheds new light on this paradox. Rather than affirming radical openness and pure _praxis_ as such, Agamben’s work helps accentuate the need of a certain contamination of _praxis_ by its own limit or apparent opposite. Importantly, this allows us to interpret Arendt and the paradoxical task of bestowing some degree of permanence to the open horizon of political action in a decidedly positive light: that _praxis_ implies a moment of impurity is the very force that sustains it without sacrificing its indeterminate nature. (shrink)

Giorgio Agamben’s work on biopower thematizes the biopolitical distinction between what the 1789 Declaration distinguishes as citoyen and homme. In this contribution, Foucault’s and Agamben’s views on biopolitics are critically discussed. It argues that a crucial distinction exists between what can be called zoēpolitics and biopolitics. Whereas the former takes the biological body as its object and is only indirectly geared towards the social body, the latter more directly has the social body as its object. Citizenship can be regarded a (...) crucial form of population control that is both zoēpolitical and biopolitical in scope. It is zoēpolitical in that it distinguishes citizens from non-citizens. It is biopolitical in that it separates the life of ‘society’ from what is today, for instance, in discourse on immigrant integration, discursively articulated as the ‘outside society’. It is thus crucial to take seriously a discourse on what ‘society’ is, who belongs to it, and who resides ‘outside of society’, instead of taking the sovereign position of defining ‘society’ as a social body existing prior to its biopolitical articulation. (shrink)

This article explores how Julia Kristeva's construction of a fictional narrative space enables her to examine the conditions that can produce a culture of revolt. Focusing on one of her novels, The Old Man and the Wolves, the article brings together Hannah Arendt's political philosophy with Duns Scotus's principle of individuation and Giorgio Agamben's notion of quodlibet to argue that the future of a culture of revolt is closely connected to the role of women. By aligning feminine thought to political (...) revolt, I demonstrate that Kristeva's revalorization of feminine experiences in the novel constitutes the basis of an ethics that includes the recognition of “whatever” forms of life that have been historically neglected. (shrink)

Roberto Esposito (1998; 2002; 2008) examines how immunological apparatuses originally designed to protect communities end up undermining communities. This paper explores comparatively his view on the interplay between community and immunity with Giorgio Agamben’s and Jacques Derrida’s, although in their works these notions appear under other labels. Beyond pointing out their similarities, the paper concludes by analyzing what, in our view, constitute the raison d’être of their ultimate and irreconcilable differences: Agamben’s approach is _antinomic_, while Derrida’s is _aporetic_ and Esposito’s (...) is rather _dialectical_. (shrink)

Those commentators who accept that Agamben offers an affirmative political project tend to hold that its realization depends upon pre-personal messianic or ontological alterations. I argue that there is another option based around the notion of individual agency that has received relatively little attention, but which clarifies whether or not Agamben holds that the transition is one that agents can participate in. By engaging with the texts “On Potentiality,” “Bartleby, or On Contingency,” and Opus Dei, I first show that he (...) develops a notion of potentiality that he claims not only underpins willing, but is also defined by an indeterminate contingency between action and non-action that undermines the binary opposition between willed action and non-action that sustains biopolitics. I then turn to the discussions of praxis, work, and poiesis in The Man without Content to determine whether Agamben thinks that other non-will-based forms of activity can contribute to the deactivation of biopolitics and, indeed,... (shrink)

This article addresses the ontological presuppositions of the discourse on world politics in political and international relations theory. We argue that the ambivalent status of world politics is due to the understanding of its central concept, that is, the world, in terms of totality or ‘the whole’. Drawing on Alain Badiou's set-theoretical ontology, this article demonstrates that such a concept is logically inconsistent, which leads the discourse on world politics to a perpetual oscillation between the presupposition of a universal totality (...) and the unmasking of its impossibility. We then proceed to the particularistic concept of the world as a limited totality with no pretense to universality, as developed in Heidegger's phenomenological ontology and Badiou's objective phenomenology. Although this approach affirming the existence of the infinity of infinite worlds appears of little use to the universalist problematic of world politics, it provides us with a pathway to the third concept of the world as the void, in which a plurality of positive worlds coexist and which is their ontological condition of possibility. We argue that only this concept of the world enables a logically consistent notion of universality as non-totalizable and immediate. The final section addresses the implications of this concept for rethinking world politics as a practice of transformation of particular worlds in accordance with the universal principles derived from the disclosure of the world as void. (shrink)

The article critically engages with Giorgio Agamben’s reading of Rousseau in order to explore the affinities between the two authors’ subtractive approach to political subjectivation. In The Kingdom and the Glory. Agamben argues that Rousseau’s Social Contract reproduces, in a secularized manner, the providential paradigm of government, whose origins Agamben finds in early Christianity. This paradigm establishes a fictitious articulation between transcendent sovereignty and immanent government, presenting particular acts of government as emanating from general divine laws. We shall demonstrate that (...) Rousseau was neither unaware of the problematic character of this paradigm nor did he venture to conceal its problems, but, on the contrary, he highlighted them throughout the Social Contract, whose key motif was the danger of the contamination of general will by particular acts, identities or interests. The same wariness of particularism characterizes Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker, often read as entirely heterogeneous to the political project of the Social Contract. By reading these two works together as the affirmation of generic existence against all forms of particularism, we bring Rousseau’s analysis closer to Agamben’s own attempts to rethink politics as subtracted from all identity predicates and contained in the affirmation of ‘whatever being’. The elucidation of affinities between Rousseau and Agamben will permit us to identify the limits of this subtractive approach to politics and outline an alternative to it. (shrink)

The paper addresses Giorgio Agamben’s affirmation of post-sovereign politics by analyzing his critical engagement with the Hobbesian problematic of the state of nature. Radicalizing Carl Schmitt’s criticism of Hobbes, Agamben deconstructs the distinction between the state of nature and the civil order of the Commonwealth by demonstrating the ‘inclusive exclusion’ of the former within the latter in the manner of the state of exception, which functions as a negative foundation of any positive order. Since the state of nature is no (...) longer cast as spatially external and temporally antecedent to the former, it cannot be escaped by the perfection of the legal order, nor can it itself be posited in an essentialist manner as a pre-political site uncontaminated by sovereign violence. While denying any way out of the state of exception, Agamben nonetheless argues for the possibility of its appropriation in the way that dissociates anomie from the locus of sovereignty and reclaims it as an attribute of free social praxis. The paper analyzes three central features of this ‘post-sovereign’ politics and concludes with a discussion of the differences between Schmitt and Agamben with regard to the fate of Hobbes ’s Leviathan in late modern politics. (shrink)

The article ventures a reading of Russian postcommunist politics from the perspective of the messianic turn in continental political philosophy, specifically Giorgio Agamben’s conception of the ‘end of history’. Taking its point of departure from a retrospective construction in the Russian political discourse of the 1990s as a period of ‘timelessness’, the paper argues that postcommunism may indeed be viewed as a paradoxical ‘time out of time’, a rupture in the ordinary temporality that entirely dispenses with the teleological horizon of (...) politics. While the problematic of the ‘end of history’ has been popularized by Francis Fukuyama’s liberal recasting of Kojève’s reading of Hegel, the Russian experience is entirely contrary to this complacent and self-gratifying account of the triumph of liberalism and accords, instead, with Agamben’s understanding of the end of history as the deactivation of the teleological dimension of politics as such. The effect of this deactivation is not a catastrophic disintegration of the social order but rather the opening of the possibility of an inoperative political praxis that is oriented towards the affirmation of existence in the pure present. The article proceeds with outlining the implications of this reading of Russian postcommunism for understanding the present conjuncture of Russian politics. (shrink)

The article addresses the critical strategy of profanation in the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, focusing on the example of pornography. Agamben’s references to pornography as a site of radical political transformation have recently been criticized as abstruse, vacuous or absurd. Moreover, his own work on the concentration camps in the Homo Sacer series has been disparagingly referred to as ‘pornography of horror’. This article ventures to refute these accusations by interpreting Agamben’s paradigmatic use of pornography in the context of his (...) wider project of profanation, understood as the overcoming of all social separations and the return of objects of social praxis to free use. Read in this context, pornography is grasped as the paradigmatic site of the constitution of the unprofanable, the epitome of the late capitalist ‘society of the spectacle’ and thus the primary target of profanatory criticism. In the remainder of the article we elucidate the logic of Agamben’s profanatory strategy and conclude that, far from being politically irrelevant, profanation constitutes the condition of the actualization of Agamben’s messianic ideal of a generic and non-exclusive community. (shrink)

There are roughly two meanings attached to the concept of dignity: humanitas and dignitas. Humanitas refers to ethical and juridical notions of equality, autonomy and freedom. Much less understood is the meaning of dignitas, which this paper develops as peoples’ engagement with aesthetic values and genres, and hence with differences between people. Departing from a critical reading of Georgio Agamben’s notion of ‘bare life’, I will analyze a case where aesthetics are quite literally at stake: women who lost their hair (...) due to cancer treatment. The analysis shows a complicated interplay between varying evaluations of female baldness by the self and others, mediated by (often strongly negative) cultural imaginaries, and aesthetic genres depicting conventional ways of ‘looking good’. The paper concludes by arguing for a reconnection of the two notions of dignity, and for a rehabilitation of aesthetics in daily life and care as fundamental values for organizing our societies. (shrink)

Beginning with a reconsideration of what the school is and has been, this paper explores the idea of the school to come. Emphasizing the governmental role of education in modernity, I offer a line of thinking that calls into question the assumption of both the school and education as possible conduits for either democracy or social justice. Drawing on Derrida’s spectral ontology I argue that any automatic correlation of education with democracy is misguided: especially within redemptive discourses that seek to (...) liberate education from its present enclosure. This rereading of the field of education in the light of an account of the fundamental ontology of its key institution problematizes all rhetorics of education as social salvation. Education, it proposes, cannot be conceived as the ideal soul of a corrupted or as yet defective body, the school. Education—having taken on the character of an ontotheological principle—has become a governmental instrument as much as its specific institutions. This ontological condition can be understood within various accounts of the nature of contemporaneity. This paper considers the monstrous proposal that education be abandoned as the grounds for social, ethical and cultural redemption. The good news is that this abandonment opens the possibility for thinking beyond education, a beyond that is also beyond the strictures of instrumental rationality. (shrink)

Cosmopolitanism has been used as a concept to open the horizons for being in the world. This article re-thinks the philosophical and political dimensions of cosmopolitanism by relating them to the new collaborative practices by artists. The concepts of agency and community will be grounded in a critical examination of the networking strategies and the practice of hospitality that have been cultivated by artistic collectives such as Stalker. The aim of this article is to ‘rescue’ the account of artistic practice (...) from the extreme version of quasi-mystical universalism and dogmatic political activism. It also seeks to argue that the abstract principles of cosmopolitanism are in a dialogue with the multicultural practices of everyday life. (shrink)

This paper problematizes current thinking about education by arguing that the question of educational purpose is not simply a socio-political question concerned with what the ends should be and why...

Giorgio Agamben defines the sacred man or Homo Sacer as one who is not worthy of sacrifice. Having lost all rights, the person is reduced to the non-human. In modern times, banishment or banning by the law occurs when a state of exception is sanctioned by a totalitarian supremacy that suspends judicial power. The state of exception does not lie within or outside the boundaries of the judicial order, but in a zone of indifference. The state of exception in which (...) the norm is annulled represents the inclusion, which in turn captures the space in which law becomes suspended. Here, I discuss how the authorities in José Saramago's Blindness and The Cave function within the law of exception, confining and defining space, and ultimately marking the Homo Sacer. (shrink)

The status of learning styles theory in educational studies is uncertain as we inhabit the liminal phase between the theory’s death as proclaimed by educational psychologists who avow to have disproven it and whatever afterlife will follow. At this moment, with both past and future in view, that we have an opportunity to reflect on the foundational assumptions of the theory. Engaging in the growing community of Agambenian philosophy of education and the ongoing dialogue around educational potentiality, this article approaches (...) learning styles theory as a paradigm of educational Megarianism. In this frame, the error of the learning styles theorists was not in the construction of a particular typology, but in the metaphysical approach to pedagogy. The reflection upon learning styles as paradigm also contributes a paradigmatic case of educational Megarianism to the discussion of potentiality in Agambenian philosophy of education. (shrink)

The status of learning styles theory in educational studies is uncertain as we inhabit the liminal phase between the theory’s death as proclaimed by educational psychologists who avow to have disproven it and whatever afterlife will follow. At this moment, with both past and future in view, that we have an opportunity to reflect on the foundational assumptions of the theory. Engaging in the growing community of Agambenian philosophy of education and the ongoing dialogue around educational potentiality, this article approaches (...) learning styles theory as a paradigm of educational Megarianism. In this frame, the error of the learning styles theorists was not in the construction of a particular typology, but in the metaphysical approach to pedagogy. The reflection upon learning styles as paradigm also contributes a paradigmatic case of educational Megarianism to the discussion of potentiality in Agambenian philosophy of education. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 55, Issue 1, Page 204-214, February 2021.

Beginning in earnest in the late 1990s, educational researchers devoted increasing attention to the study of “active learning,” leading to a robust literature on the topic in the scholarship of teaching and learning. Meanwhile, during largely the same period, political theorists discovered the radical philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, which soon after began to ripple through more radical forms of philosophy of education. While both the SoTL works on active learning and writings of “Agambenian” philosophers of education have offered new insights (...) into their respective fields, active learning has not yet received a systematic philosophical reflection and the community of Agambenian philosophy of education has not yet been systematized. This article addresses both gaps, first through an outline of existing Agambenian approaches to the philosophy of education and second by theorizing active learning as a form of “destituent potential.” The systematic reflection on the three threads of Agambenian philosophy of education—whatever, potentiality, and study—offers an introduction to less familiar readers, and the second section offers a model for how philosophical concepts can become theoretical tools for SoTL analysis. (shrink)

This paper examines the discourse of war from a semiotic point of view and suggests some ideas for the development of practices of resistance to it. The discourse of war can be considered symptomatic in respect to underlying discourses of totality such as globalisation. By aiming at explanatory simplification, this kind of discourse takes the paradoxical form of an exhaustive paradigm which always engenders a residuum to be eliminated. Semiotics can develop practices of resistance to the discourse of war by (...) operating on the syntagmatic chains generated by its mediatic agencies. These practices are based on the postmodernist critique of totalising discourses. A process in which details are disconnected from the mediatic chains where they vanish might trigger the opening of a space of community that makes the residuum of war discourse presentable through metaphorical substitutions. Semiotic practices of resistance to the discourse of war presuppose a shift in theory from the paradigm of globality to that of partiality. Partiality must be understood both from a political and an epistemological point of view and it could therefore represent an important element in the development of a semioethics. (shrink)

Volume 24, Issue 5, October 2019, Page 3-10.

Agamben’s notion of the ‘paradigm’ has far-reaching implications for educational thinking, curriculum design and pedagogical conduct. In his approach, examples—or paradigms—deeply engage our powers of analogy, enabling us to discern previously unseen affinities among singular objects by stepping outside established systems of classification. In this way we come to envision novel groupings, new patterns of connection—that nonetheless do not simply reassemble those singular objects into yet another rigidly fixed set or class. Agamben sees this sort of ‘paradigmatic understanding’ as our (...) richest source of intelligibility. For Agamben the paradigm is ultimately about learning to see again, starting not with already perfectly known and categorized objects (or ideas), but rather with a fresh experience of one individual object and the analogical relations it may have to others, and to novel groupings that may arise. The paradigm is a method, a way in which educators might respond to a wide range of educational challenges. For a paradigmatic relation suspends while exposing, deactivates while revealing, complicates while clarifying. But articulating the enigmatic paradigmatic relation between example and class is far more than a method. It is epistemological (a way of knowing and conception of knowledge), ethical (a fostering of freedom from presupposed categories and reified principles) and ontological (a type of being that exposes the potential of knowing and communicating—their intelligibility and communicability). In these qualities, paradigms exhibit to educators a free, a new use of singularities. (shrink)

This article argues that Agamben’s conception of fiction is crucial for understanding his recent works. I suggest that the key to understanding Agamben conception of fiction is to be found in a few curious remarks at the end of Language and Death. These remarks explain why the distinctions between life and death, animal life and human life, bare life and political forms of life, the outlaw and the sovereign, and the norm and the exception that continue to preoccupy Agamben are (...) all fictions. After considering Agamben’s account of these fictions and their relation to the relevant passage in Language and Death, the article explores the ways Agamben thinks the fictions that govern human action and social life might be unworked. (shrink)